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To: Ira Player who wrote (20210)	11/17/1998 12:27:00 AM
From: Clarksterh	Respond to of 25960

The limit will be economic, not technical. Fab's continue to get much more expensive. Can you see the insurance companies wanting to insure a $30 billion dollar facility? Interesting idea deserving of more thought. I agree that the end will, by definition, be economic, in the sense that we will always be able to get more and more circuits per cubic cm, but that eventually it will get too expensive in the sense that the cost per transistor no longer goes down (this could be either due to technological limitations, or, as you point out, system fragility in the fabs, but I tend to believe the former). But I don't think that the unit cost of fabs will be the deciding factor. By the time we have 30 billion dollar fabs Intel and the foundries will have revenues of several hundred billion. As long as the fabs are still profitable, I would expect them to find some way around the problems dealing with vast sums of money (like the space industry originally did to get insurance). Again, JMO. Clark PS So you are a player. In what area?